I don’t like when people tell me what to pay attention to and by an act of omission block my access to things they do not approve. This is what media gatekeepers do by choosing who to promote and when. An individual gatekeeper doesn’t have much sway, but multiple gatekeepers sharing the same prejudices narrows the field. Massive swathes of the human population are rendered invisible and alienated simply because the gatekeepers have no interest in promoting them to a larger audience.
Enter social media. The general public can publish what we have to offer and find others who share our interests. As a result the gatekeepers are no longer the sole arbitrators of what I see and don’t see. This is why I follow bloggers using Newsblur and WordPress, enjoy streaming sites like YouTube and Soundcloud, and delight in microblogger sites like Diaspora, Ello, or even Twitter.
This means I have willingly dropped out of the media consumption machine. I view fewer movies out of Hollywood. (I can’t recall seeing a single movie in theaters all of this year so far.) I buy fewer albums from mainstream labels. I am less likely to pay for streaming media built on promoting “popular” artists. I cancel my mainstream magazine subscriptions (online and paper). I buy very few books from major publishers. I and people like me take our earning power and apply it to those non-promoted, independent artists, movie makers, and authors we can relate to. Perhaps this is what the gatekeepers want; they don’t care about those portions of the population, so it doesn’t matter to them whether or not we check out.
Unless it gets to the point where the number of us checking out begins to make a dent in their pockets. I’ll use the music industry as an example, an industry that prefers emerging artists well under the age of 30 with a certain “look”. I hear some of their gatekeepers complain about people not wanting to buy music anymore. Maybe it isn’t that people don’t want to buy music. Maybe those of us who are invisible to them have so much earning power that our withdrawal from the scene has made an impact. After all working adults over 40 generally have a lot more money to spend than teens and twentysomethings, the demographic most of the music industry focuses on. Maybe if we were seeing talented newcomers to the industry who are our age and older–you can’t convince me they aren’t out there–we would be sharing our considerable financial strength with the industry in greater numbers.
That doesn’t mean I’m not interested in what younger artists in the music industry have to offer. There are some I deeply admire and follow religiously. It’s lucky for the world that the media gatekeepers found these artists palatable enough to their eyes and ears that they gave them the time of day, or we still might not know about them. But when the same age range and look is the only demographic being presented, it’s time to look elsewhere. I suspect that is what many of us are beginning to do.